Rachel Lin grew up lost in the shuffle of foster care. Last fall, she beat the odds by starting at Vassar. I was born in Taiwan--my mom had me when she was about seventeen. I'm...

Rachel Lin grew up lost in the shuffle of foster care. Last fall, she beat the odds by starting at Vassar. I was born in Taiwan--my mom had me when she was about seventeen. I’m... Rachel Lin grew up lost in the shuffle of foster care. Last fall, she beat the odds by starting at Vassar.

I was born in Taiwan--my mom had me when she was about seventeen. I’m one year and one day younger than my sister Maggie. A street gang murdered my father not long after I was born. When I was still very little, my mom got a boyfriend. We lived with him for a while, and it was terrible. We were often left alone in the apartment and he didn’t treat us right. One of my most vivid memories of childhood is when Maggie and I tried to run away. One night when I was about six, we went to take out the trash and just bolted. But we were picked up and brought home pretty quickly.

Eventually, Maggie and I went to live with my father’s mother. But my mom didn’t want to give us up and tried to get us back. So when I was about seven, my grandmother sold all her jewelry, packed us up, and brought us to America, where she had some family.

We moved to a small city called Walnut, outside of Los Angeles. My grandma rented a room in a house from someone. But things still weren’t great. My uncle started hitting us, and when Maggie and I went to school, the teachers noticed. They’d ask, "How did you get those bruises?" We lied, because we had to. But it got to a point when, in first or second grade, my uncle hit me so hard my appendix ruptured and it had to be removed. That was enough to cause the state to take us into its supervision, so my sister and I were placed in the foster care system.

After I got out of the hospital, Maggie and I moved in with my first foster family. We were really scared--we still didn’t speak much English and didn’t feel comfortable in our surroundings. Meanwhile, my grandmother had gone back to Taiwan because she wasn’t able to do anything since we were now in the state system. We were moved to a second foster family for a while, before being placed in my great-aunt’s house. It was a better situation because we knew the family and could speak Mandarin with them. We stayed there until the end of my fifth-grade year.

One night while Maggie and I were watching TV, we got a phone call from our social worker. She said, "We’re going to move you." My sister was drop-dead devastated, but I was too young to really care.